Question

I have never really used regular expressions all that much and as such i have a few questions.

Basically i have built a simple class that returns text inbetween user specified tags.

function getData($tagname){
    $this->tagname = $tagname;
    $string = $this->dump;
    $pattern = "/<$tagname>(.*?)<\/$tagname>/s";
    preg_match($pattern,$string,$matches,PREG_OFFSET_CAPTURE);
    print_r($matches);
}

This is giving me the info required but its returning multiple copies in the array, im just wondering what the reason behind this is?

For example

$depData->getData('departureTime');

Returns

Array ( [0] => Array ( [0] => 2012/03/07 12:45:13 [1] => 41 ) [1] => Array ( [0] => 2012/03/07 12:45:13 [1] => 56 ) ) 

Im thinking that its something to do with my regex being to vague?

Answer 1

It’s giving giving you 2 results first is for the whole expresion <tag>(.*?)</tag> and the second result is for the result in the parentheses (.*?)

Also I created an example for you to see the difference between the first capture (whole expression) and the parentheses capture (your serach).

http://xrg.es/#1ompqhf

Note: I replaced < and > with " for you to see more clearly what’s different.